Grandmother/ i want to cause discomfort/ squeeze these angled bones/ between warmth & the side of Your armchair/ tell me i am pinching Your leg/ allow me to stay/ still/ i dream dirtied neutrals/ woven Southwestern armchair/ purchased from the Arizona cousin/ with a house/ as big as a child could imagine/ i dream even the sheet/ draped over the chair/ decades of dogs scratching dinner/ into its cushion/ tell me again/ i am …
1. Christmas Lights
What made it December, in the fields, was that everything
Was silent, except for the ice creaking in every blade of grass,
As if each one …
Milling about before the clinic
opened for a routine blood test,
I walked through a flurry of parakeets,
ducking as they swooped to feed
on blueberries & sunflower seeds,
& …
In late September in northern Colorado, where the Rocky Mountains meet the plains in the traditional and ancestral lands of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Ute Nations and peoples, the waist-high …
The fusty pinstriped suit jackets of larger men
are sagging the racks. Stretch full length in one until
your ears surge and still your fingertips won’t reach
out of the …
Cats own the breakwater rocks of Cádiz. This has been decreed – or has grown up as a consequence of cats deciding it and congregating there: Cats own …
My grandmother’s house was made of strong, black coffee cooked in white enamel on gas burners lit with sturdy kitchen matches of some unnamed wood with magical sulfur heads that …
I find her seated at the kitchen table at two a.m., her red dress a large heart in the dark’s chest. I flip the light switch: she stares past the …
If I could move I’d close the shutters he left open. I’d trap the windowsill blackbird in the house. If I could move I’d take the pears—almost rotten as usual—from their …
I am in a eucalyptus grove next to a playground. I am seven, or eight, my school is Catholic, and recess begins and ends with a bell that stings. You …
